Tim Sandlin - Skipped Parts

Last winter I would have given everything Caspar owned to feel warmth again, but now all I wanted was shade.

“North Carolina was never this hot,” I said to Lydia.

“Sure, it was. We simply didn’t attend the rodeo in Greensboro. Civilized humans stayed inside under the air conditioner.”

Dougie perked up some at the word civilized . His Ban-Lon shirt had the biggest pit stains I’d ever seen and his face was sunburning by the moment.

“You oughta get a hat,” I told him. I had on a used straw Stetson Delores had given me that morning. She showed me how to slope the brim into a V so water and snow wouldn’t collect and dump when you look down at your hands.

“It’ll never snow again,” I said.

“That’s the spirit.”

The Callahan gang sat in a row—Dougie, Lydia, Delores, me, Maurey, and Dothan—at the top of the bleachers with five or six feet of breathing space on all sides. And five or six feet was a lot. Everyone in the county plus a smattering of into-the-local-scene tourists were packed in those bleachers, sweating all over each other. Buddy, Annabel, and Petey sat right off the rail by the bucking chutes with Stebbins and his odd brood three rows behind them. Buddy was big and hairy as ever. If he knew Maurey was nearby he didn’t let on any. Annabel had traded in the blue parka for a turtleneck sweater. I couldn’t believe it.

Between the two families, a tour group of senior citizens from Omaha, Nebraska, fanned themselves with their Wyoming Activities guides. I counted—thirty-five blue hairs and one bald man.

Maurey saw them too and pointed out the irony to Dothan. “Senior citizen tours are always women. You think men don’t live that long or they refuse to ride buses?”

Irony wasted, Dothan grunted and popped open a warm Coors. I wasn’t just happy as a lark about his presence in the Callahan gang in the first place. Dot had heard rumors that he was the real father of Maurey’s baby; letting him hang out with us would only fuel that kind of disgusting innuendo. I could just see me paying for the baby—or Lydia through Caspar paying for the baby—and me changing diapers, teaching it to read, playing tooth fairy to it, while county lore held that Dothan’s sperm produced it.

They’d be calling me the house-virgin. If forced to choose, I’d rather get the kid than the credit, but I deserved both. After all, Dothan got the girl.

Maurey kept bumping her shoulder into him and touching his knee. To make her jealous, I let Delores touch my knee while I leaned over and whispered in her ear, and I laughed way loud when she said I had such pretty hair and ran her fingernails behind my ear.

Delores was into her black look, complete with a black cowhide flask she wore on a thong over her shoulder like a purse. When she leaned toward me I could see her black panties under her short black skirt.

“Mex-cans were right,” she said. “Nothing like tequila to take the heat off.”

“Let me try some.”

The grand entry parade was colorful—lots of flags, and Shriners in tiny cars, and decked-out cowgirls in flashy Western wear. The difference between these healthy girls and the Southern types, besides wide shoulders and competency, was that the cowgirls spent more time grooming their horses’ tails than their own hair. You could tell. The girls were pretty, for the most part, but the horses were king-hell amazing. Coats glittered, heads tossed and snorted, front feet pranced for the fun of prancing. That was a proud bunch of animals.

Maurey punched me on the shoulder. “If it wasn’t for you, Frostbite and I would be out there.” Her voice was friendlylike, so I took it more as a comment than criticism. It was easy to picture Maurey on a showoff horse. She had the perfect posture for cow-girling.

Mom can’t stand it when people take something seriously that she thinks is silly. The thought that a cowboy is admired and considered hot stuff because he can rope a calf or stay on a horse makes Lydia gag.

“That man is strutting.” She pointed to a skinny bowlegged kid named Neb Larks who’d just been dumped in the dirt by a bareback Appaloosa. “I can’t abide strutting. He thinks all eyes are on his crotch and he’s proved his manhood.”

“All eyes are on his crotch,” Delores pointed out.

My eyes were on his jeans flapping off his butt. The kid had no ass at all, just loose jeans with a round Copenhagen-can imprint worn into the right back pocket.

Lydia was on a roll. “The timed riding of a bucking horse is nothing more than competitive sex. Proof that the man can subjugate anything wild and beautiful and free if he can just get it between his legs.”

“Isn’t the man generally between the woman’s legs?” I asked.

Delores’s hand squeezed my thigh. “What gets me is they want a belt buckle for lasting eight seconds.”

Dougie sniffed. On top of his sunburn, he had bad hay fever. “A real man doesn’t have to prove his manhood in public.”

“How would you know?” Lydia asked.

She kept up a running commentary on gene pools—“That boy’s parents were siblings. Look at his chin, how can they let him out of the house with a chin that cries incest”—and sexual preferences—“Homosexuals, they’re all latent homosexuals”— clear through bareback, saddle broncs, and calf roping.

She found the ropers especially disgusting. “They’re child molesters. At least the horses outweigh their subjugators. This is baby rape.”

“What’s a subjugator?” Dothan asked.

I gave him Lydia’s Lord-why-do-I-suffer-fools look but he didn’t care. He asked Maurey. “How often does she shut up?”

Maurey laughed like this was the pithiest comment she’d heard in days. I decided to ask Delores if I could see her naked later.

When it came time for bulldogging, the P.A. man said the first entry was Hank Elkrunner with Ft. Worth Jones as his hazer. There was a gap of time I used to look out at the cemetery, then the yearling, Hank, and Ft. Worth exploded into the arena. I saw the calf’s eyes first, all wet, black and white, bugged in terror, then I saw Hank’s hair. It’d always been longer than a white guy’s, but now it flowed back in the wind like a black mane.

Hank came off his horse fast and violent, lifted the yearling, shoved in a leg, and slapped it to the ground— Bam . Happened so quick, by the time I realized it was over, Hank was swatting dust off his chaps as he walked back to his horse and Ft. Worth was grinning at some girls in Rexburgh, Idaho, letter jackets.

I looked over at Lydia whose face had gone pale blank and said, “Twice I asked Ft. Worth how he spells his first name and both times he said, ‘F-T period, like the town,’ only you don’t spell the town F-T period at all. It’s F-O-R-T, Fort.”

Lydia ignored me, as usual, so I went on. “You think I should tell him he’s been misspelling his name all his life?”

Dougie gingerly touched his shrimp-red neck. “So what perversion do bulldoggers prefer? You’ve rated everyone else by their choice of competition.”

Lydia blinked a couple times and kind of shook herself awake. “They need a hazer, someone to position the woman before they throw her on her back.”

“Looked like a stud to me,” Delores said.

Lydia finally shut up.

During barrel racing Delores put her hand on my leg. “I need a Coke.”

Dougie squinted down the line. “Coca-Cola and tequila don’t mix properly. You’ll awaken with a hangover.”

“I’d think I was sick if I didn’t awaken with a hangover. Sam, honey, go get us two Cokes with lots of ice.”

“Can I wait till after the girls finish? This is neat.”

She dug her fingernails into my thigh. “I want a Coke with lots of ice, now.”